Part one: The face of a community (with video)

Ada Luk says her high-profile job at Fairchild TV allows her to help other Chinese immigrants

Ada Luk rarely goes out without being recognized. She’s the anchor of British Columbia’s most-watched, Chinese television newscast, a reporter and host of a documentary program called M26.

Series introduction, by Daphne Bramham:

Everyone has a story, especially here.

Vancouver’s history is studded with characters and now, more than ever, it is a magnet for every kind of person from every part of the world.

Yet as the city and surrounding communities have grown into Metro, there’s a deep sense of isolation.

People live in silos, separated by race, culture, language, income, age and even geography.

We don’t know each other. We don’t speak to neighbours, strike up conversations on the bus and grocery checkout lines or make an effort to make newcomers feel welcome.

Yet, there was an overwhelming yearning for connection and understanding among the nearly 3,900 people surveyed by the Vancouver Foundation.

So, who are we, anyway?

Over the summer for 12 Saturdays, I’ll profile a few of the people who live here.

Some, like Ada Luk (profiled today), are well-known within a segment of the community and virtually unknown outside it. Some are better known outside Metro than they are here. Still others do odd or obscure jobs.

But, all of them are interesting.

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Ada Luk rarely goes out without being recognized. She’s the anchor of British Columbia’s most-watched Chinese television newscast, a reporter and the host of a documentary program called M26.

Invariably people approach her, often with such familiarity that Luk does a mental check to try to figure out whether she does actually know them.

“They see me as a friend,” she says. “It’s very rewarding.”

Luk’s job at Fairchild Television differs little from that of her colleagues in other media. Although she works primarily in her mother tongue, Cantonese, Luk frequently does interviews in English. Recently, she’s done one-on-one interviews with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Christy Clark. Those interviews were aired with Chinese subtitles and voice-overs.

But unlike some television news anchors, Luk also does daily reporting and works on documentaries.

Her investigative work has resulted in five nominations and two wins at the Jack Webster Awards for outstanding journalism. One of her winning stories focused on the world after 9/11. The other story was about Cheryl Hutchinson, who has cerebral palsy and successfully sued the government for the right to pay her father to be her caregiver. Up until Hutchinson’s lawsuit, relatives could not be paid — only strangers.

“I’ve been amazed by her courage. She finished a degree at UBC and she had the courage to fight our government and she won.”

The other work Luk mentions proudly is her series on the rehabilitation of Chinese-Canadian inmates in the correctional system. The Canadian system, which focuses on reform, is fundamentally different from the punishment-based penal systems that most Chinese immigrants are used to. What Luk set out to do was to show how the system works and what it means to the individuals who are given a second chance.

She views her role more broadly than most journalists. Luk believes both she and Fairchild TV have important roles to play in helping new immigrants integrate and helping immigrants’ children learn their parents’ mother tongue. But that’s not all.

“Our existence helps to bring out the voice of our community in the broader society.”

Arrival and adjustment

Luk recalls her nervous arrival in 1991 at Vancouver International Airport after the long flight from Hong Kong with her family. They’d never been here before.

“I wasn’t sure what would happen next,” she says. “I already missed my grandparents and my other relatives in Hong Kong and I didn’t know how I was going to settle down here. My parents were not too good in English, but they were planning to set up a business. How they’d do that, they weren’t sure because they didn’t know much about how it was done here.”

Among the many changes after choosing to settle in Richmond was renaming. Luk Siu Man became Ada.

“My mother chose it. It was the first one in the dictionary [of names].”

Luk was one of many English-as-a-second-language students in Grade 9 that year. She found it difficult, but did well enough that by Grade 10 she was in the mainstream.

Her parents, meanwhile, decided to start D’Fresh Bakery in Richmond. They later expanded to three other stores, but have since cut back to two: the original one in the Empire Centre and another in Burnaby’s Crystal Mall. Luk helped out for the first few months when the family business was starting. But soon, her mother insisted she concentrate on her studies. That said, Luk describes herself as an indifferent student, even during her four years at UBC, where she studied psychology and economics.

“I hadn’t even thought of journalism. But one of my school friends was working part-time at [Chinese-language newspaper] Tsing Tao. Every day, she was telling me how interesting it was and who she’d interviewed that day. So, I was kind of thinking that maybe I’d like to be a journalist or a reporter.”

Soon after her final exam, Luk saw Fairchild TV’s ad for reporters. Her father encouraged her. He’d toyed with the idea of journalism in his youth and has always stayed on top of news and current affairs. Luk got the job.

“I just love it. It’s hard to explain the magic of this profession that turns someone like me with no direction into someone who is really dedicated.”

Speaking with her one-on-one, there’s a visible and audible difference between Luk, the private person, and Luk, the television anchor. It’s something even she finds a bit surprising.

“I have a different personality. Normally, I’m a very dependent girl, but as a reporter I have to be tough.”

Luk works long hours and, even when she’s not officially on the job, she’s often thinking about stories. Despite the busy work schedule of reporting, documentary work and anchoring the news, Luk says going beyond just being a news presenter is important, not only for her, but also for her colleagues who do the Mandarin broadcast.

“It helps us stay on top of stories and current affairs. It means I’m not just the information messenger,” she says. “It’s hard to leave the work behind. It’s easier when you’re doing daily news. But for the documentaries, my mother is always asking me, ‘Are you thinking about something at work?’

“But documentaries are non-stop projects ... Every documentary story is like I’m raising a baby. Every time, I feel like it’s a new achievement because I’m learning new stuff and I’m meeting new people. I love that process of putting the story together.”

It takes a toll on her personal life; Luk isn’t married. “That’s a trade-off. As a reporter, I’m always working 24/7 and my boyfriend is always complaining that I work too much. But he sort of understands. He used to work here as a graphic designer.”

Now in her 30s, Luk barely looks old enough to be out of high school and requires only a skiff of makeup to get ready to deliver the news. But she works in a medium that places a high value on youth and beauty, whether the TV station is in Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles or Vancouver.

“They love to put young ladies on camera. It’s also one of the challenges if you want to keep the younger generation loyal to your television newscast.”

Gaining or maintaining younger audiences is difficult enough for mainstream media in North America, as most are getting their news from other sources, particularly online. For Fairchild’s Cantonese channel, it’s even harder. Immigration from Hong Kong has slowed to a trickle — only 253 people came in 2010. With fewer Cantonese speakers immigrating, it means fewer — if any — Cantonese-speaking kids arriving. The children who are born here to immigrant parents may speak Cantonese at home, but they speak English at school and are surrounded by it in the broader community.

Luk says many of the younger Chinese-Canadians are watching her newscast at their parents’ insistence as part of their language training.

“I’m not only a news anchor, I’m a Chinese teacher,” she says, noting she chooses her on-air words carefully and stays away from complicated phrasing.

With fewer immigrants, the adult audience is also changing. Viewers have been here longer and are better integrated. It doesn’t mean Fairchild will abandon its mandate to ease settlement. Luk says it means viewers now are demanding, and receiving, more complicated and nuanced stories — particularly about politics.

Might there come a time when the station will use more English and less Cantonese?

“No, we would lose our purpose if we did that. We still have to serve those new immigrants and those who prefer to watch in their first language. We have to find a balance, but we can’t lose our identity.”

Shifting trends

In 1991, Metro Vancouver already had a substantial Chinese community. But immigration from Hong Kong in advance of the colony’s 1997 return to Chinese control was picking up, peaking in 1994 when 15,384 immigrants arrived. In the decade leading up to the handover, more than 96,000 people left Hong Kong and came to Vancouver.

While immigration from Hong Kong has slowed, immigration from Mainland China and Taiwan remains strong. Since 1997, more than 121,300 Mainland Chinese have arrived and nearly 35,700 people have come from Taiwan.

They mainly speak Mandarin, which is why Fairchild also has news and current affairs programs in that language. They compete for viewers with eight Chinese-government television stations broadcast on cable, three Taiwanese cable stations as well as Global TV’s national news in Mandarin, available on Shaw cable.

Over the years, several of Luk’s colleagues have moved back to Hong Kong and have thrived in the media there. She thought about it, but it’s not for her.

“I’ve made my final decision to stay here. If I went to Hong Kong, I would be working for a Chinese outlet. Here, what’s unique is that I work at a Chinese television station and I have my own mission,” she says.

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